11-29-2019, 08:49 AM
Very cool images!, the first is 3d, are you trying out building any of these weapons in 3d so you have a better understanding of what your designs have to achieve and how they have to be interpreted? it's becoming more and more common for game artists to be able to design, and for designers to be able to build the final assets themselves, 2d or 3d, especially when we talk about indie projects, most of which won't bother to budget for a concept artist when they could just have the 3d/pixel/2d artist design the assets themselves.
Even if you don't want to go for sculpting/modelling jobs, the understanding you get from actually building these designs in something close to what will be the final medium is invaluable, nowadays 3d is stupidly easy, blender and unreal are free, and unreal comes with lots of megascans assets, combined with quixel mixer you can quickly start testing out your designs for free, houdini has a free apprentice version, and if you are into fashion you should definitely look into marvelous/clo3d, while there's a learning period to any software, nowadays it's from a few hours to barely a few days for most, and fundamental drawing skills perfectly overlap, seriously, modelling is just drawing, the only difference is you get to move the depth axis around, but it's the same feeling as 2d drawing.
I'm getting a bit repetitive but are you making sure to take the final products into consideration?, making pretty concept illustrations is great and very inspiring, but ultimately they are gonna become 2d or 3d assets, be that for a movie, or a tabletop game miniature or a videogame, they gotta be castable, or printable, or riggable, movable etc. solid perspective skills make a lot of these things very easy to take into account because you would be easily able to visualize in your head whether the armor you designed is going to clip into itself when a character moves or not, plus lots of other things like how figures and products feel to the touch , how easily the hierarchies and smaller rhythms of the design are going to be translated into a lower poly model, or into a 2d sprite that will bend and warp; solid perspective skills let you visualize and break down all these things in the early stages, saves you time, saves your team time. And when it comes to things like how a piece of armor is engineered, what it has to do, how to has to hang off the body or be tied to it, the understanding of space you get from practicing perspective really hard makes all those problems very logical and the solutions intuitive.
If you aren't trying to go for building game assets and you wanna stick to the more illustration-y side of design, things like item icons, or armor illustrations for tabletop handbooks and such, well, that's just drawing and graphic design skill, that's studying aesthetics, learning about shape language, and learning to translate things into a consistent style, types of things that become easier to learn when you do batches of work in a similar style instead of single one off pieces, pushing your observation, learning to recognise proportions and rhythms better.
You mentioned an interest in creature design, and, imo, unless you are going for very abstract 2d creatures, the level of drawing you need to comfortably break down and design animal anatomy is pretty high, you have to deal with several layers of materials (bone, muscle, fascia, fat, scales, fur...) coordinating all of them at once, balancing them out, getting shapes to go soft and go hard in specific places consistently, being able to make them squash and stretch, practicing fundamentals will make the process of learning this stuff so much faster and easier so you can spend more time learning about cladistics, comparative anatomy, ecology and all that other stuff that goes hand in hand with creatures.
I mean, look at people like carlos huante or edayan and the rest of the monster hunter capcom crew, terryl whitlatch, aaron blaise, ville sinkkonen or even wayne barlowe, they wouldn't be able to do what they do without very solid fundamentals, improving your draftsmanship pushes how much information you can comfortably process, which ultimately lets you make better decisions, use reference more effectively, and correct things without having to guess as much.
Also, in the end if you wanna be able to light something, there's tricks you can use to make forms pop, strong terminators, pillow shading and whatever else, but ultimately correct rendering is just linear perspective on steroids, being able to comfortably track points in space, really understanding the angles of the planes that make up your design is what any later decisions about how you want to graphically represent your design rest upon, almost meaning that if you can't light something properly, you don't really know what's happening spatially with your design (local values, materials, atmospheric perspective, sss etc. are a different conversation), which in a way makes it a cool exercise to keep your perspective skills in check.
I guess to wrap it all up, even if you didn't want to build 3dimensional stuff, the images you've posted show a strong understanding of shape language and aesthetics, things like balance, echoing, transition, opposition etc. skills that are forever going to be limited by how well you can perceive distances and angles, qualities of line and shape, color, value, stuff you learn from practicing observation, are you practicing your observation skills regularly? can you accurately recognise and replicate angles, curves etc.? the better you are at that, the less time you'll spend fighting your lines, and the better you'll be at recognising what gives a design its character. Multiple people have already listed -in several threads- books, programs/courses and exercises you can do to practice your observation, from copying photos, to still lifes, to all other kinds of things, I'm sure we've all seen them.
Also, just a couple questions, how many hours of actual drawing/designing practice do you put in weekly, and what are your goals in terms of jobs, is there any specific position you want, a company, or a project you'd like to make/work on.
Last thing, I hope you know Trent Kaniuga, he has a youtube channel, talks a lot about learning and practicing, does a lot of stuff similar to what you've posted, he's been working for a couple decades now, so his career could be a good example of the "extra stuff" you might need to get good at if you want to do this for a living.
Also, I'm being kind of vague because I don't want to start recommending plans or resources before I really get what you are going for.
Even if you don't want to go for sculpting/modelling jobs, the understanding you get from actually building these designs in something close to what will be the final medium is invaluable, nowadays 3d is stupidly easy, blender and unreal are free, and unreal comes with lots of megascans assets, combined with quixel mixer you can quickly start testing out your designs for free, houdini has a free apprentice version, and if you are into fashion you should definitely look into marvelous/clo3d, while there's a learning period to any software, nowadays it's from a few hours to barely a few days for most, and fundamental drawing skills perfectly overlap, seriously, modelling is just drawing, the only difference is you get to move the depth axis around, but it's the same feeling as 2d drawing.
I'm getting a bit repetitive but are you making sure to take the final products into consideration?, making pretty concept illustrations is great and very inspiring, but ultimately they are gonna become 2d or 3d assets, be that for a movie, or a tabletop game miniature or a videogame, they gotta be castable, or printable, or riggable, movable etc. solid perspective skills make a lot of these things very easy to take into account because you would be easily able to visualize in your head whether the armor you designed is going to clip into itself when a character moves or not, plus lots of other things like how figures and products feel to the touch , how easily the hierarchies and smaller rhythms of the design are going to be translated into a lower poly model, or into a 2d sprite that will bend and warp; solid perspective skills let you visualize and break down all these things in the early stages, saves you time, saves your team time. And when it comes to things like how a piece of armor is engineered, what it has to do, how to has to hang off the body or be tied to it, the understanding of space you get from practicing perspective really hard makes all those problems very logical and the solutions intuitive.
If you aren't trying to go for building game assets and you wanna stick to the more illustration-y side of design, things like item icons, or armor illustrations for tabletop handbooks and such, well, that's just drawing and graphic design skill, that's studying aesthetics, learning about shape language, and learning to translate things into a consistent style, types of things that become easier to learn when you do batches of work in a similar style instead of single one off pieces, pushing your observation, learning to recognise proportions and rhythms better.
You mentioned an interest in creature design, and, imo, unless you are going for very abstract 2d creatures, the level of drawing you need to comfortably break down and design animal anatomy is pretty high, you have to deal with several layers of materials (bone, muscle, fascia, fat, scales, fur...) coordinating all of them at once, balancing them out, getting shapes to go soft and go hard in specific places consistently, being able to make them squash and stretch, practicing fundamentals will make the process of learning this stuff so much faster and easier so you can spend more time learning about cladistics, comparative anatomy, ecology and all that other stuff that goes hand in hand with creatures.
I mean, look at people like carlos huante or edayan and the rest of the monster hunter capcom crew, terryl whitlatch, aaron blaise, ville sinkkonen or even wayne barlowe, they wouldn't be able to do what they do without very solid fundamentals, improving your draftsmanship pushes how much information you can comfortably process, which ultimately lets you make better decisions, use reference more effectively, and correct things without having to guess as much.
Also, in the end if you wanna be able to light something, there's tricks you can use to make forms pop, strong terminators, pillow shading and whatever else, but ultimately correct rendering is just linear perspective on steroids, being able to comfortably track points in space, really understanding the angles of the planes that make up your design is what any later decisions about how you want to graphically represent your design rest upon, almost meaning that if you can't light something properly, you don't really know what's happening spatially with your design (local values, materials, atmospheric perspective, sss etc. are a different conversation), which in a way makes it a cool exercise to keep your perspective skills in check.
I guess to wrap it all up, even if you didn't want to build 3dimensional stuff, the images you've posted show a strong understanding of shape language and aesthetics, things like balance, echoing, transition, opposition etc. skills that are forever going to be limited by how well you can perceive distances and angles, qualities of line and shape, color, value, stuff you learn from practicing observation, are you practicing your observation skills regularly? can you accurately recognise and replicate angles, curves etc.? the better you are at that, the less time you'll spend fighting your lines, and the better you'll be at recognising what gives a design its character. Multiple people have already listed -in several threads- books, programs/courses and exercises you can do to practice your observation, from copying photos, to still lifes, to all other kinds of things, I'm sure we've all seen them.
Also, just a couple questions, how many hours of actual drawing/designing practice do you put in weekly, and what are your goals in terms of jobs, is there any specific position you want, a company, or a project you'd like to make/work on.
Last thing, I hope you know Trent Kaniuga, he has a youtube channel, talks a lot about learning and practicing, does a lot of stuff similar to what you've posted, he's been working for a couple decades now, so his career could be a good example of the "extra stuff" you might need to get good at if you want to do this for a living.
Also, I'm being kind of vague because I don't want to start recommending plans or resources before I really get what you are going for.